A Near Thing in Auschwitz
Around 1990 I was invited to Crakow in Poland for a scientific meeting. I flew in and took a taxi to the hotel, a modern building just outside the town centre on a bank of the Vistula with a lovely view across to the old town and the Wawel castle. The meeting itself was unremarkable.
After the meeting, on my last day in Crakow I had planned to visit Auschwitz. The site of the Nazi concentration camp is near the village of Oswiecim about 30 miles west of Crakow. I took a taxi. The driver was very keen to drive me back after my visit and offered to stay on, presumably without taking any other fares, until I came out. I agreed a price with him, went into the modern entrance hall, bought a ticket and started my tour with a feeling of fear, sadness and a strange, and unwelcome, pride, as though I was saying to myself “This is a terrible place, where inconceivable acts of cruelty took place, but we British would never have done it”.
For a long time I had been horribly fascinated by the concept of ‘extermination’ and its application to Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other ‘undesirables’. As a young child I had heard people talking about the Nazis, Hitler and ‘The Final Solution’. I had heard of Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen. But, and it was probably just as well, I could not grasp the reality. Rather, I got the impression that these deeds, people and places were, like blood-sucking vampires, like Sinbad’s incubus, like Red-Riding-Hood’s wolf, not real but mythical, metaphors for horror rather than horror itself. My mother, looking at a thin child (even her own – me!) would say “Needs a good feed – looks like someone out of Belsen”. So the name ‘Belsen’, rather than evoking the unimaginably terrible hell of starvation, torture and death that it was, became, to me simply the symbol of just…skinnyness.
But as I grew older and listened to the radio and watched Pathe News I began to pick up messages of cruelty and inhumanity on a scale that completely overwhelmed my ability to absorb. I watched in disbelief, that was always overtaken by numbed belief, the pictures of skeletal corpses being bulldozed into mass graves; the lines of mothers holding the hands, for the last time, of the children they would never see again; the piled up naked bodies of elderly men and women denied even the token dignity of a scrap of clothing at the cruel end of their shattered lives.
As my incredulity evaporated and I started to store the truth and its evidence into my hungry memory banks I realised for the first awful time, when I was about fourteen years old, that there was a rotten black dried-blood-encrusted cancer right at the centre of the human character. From that time on I hated any kind of discrimination whether it be against people of different races, faiths or whatever. From that time on I became a Socialist, a United Nations supporter, an anti-nationalist, a pan-European, an atheist, a humanist and a democrat. And from that time on I wanted to visit those places where the evil had happened so that I might, just might, be able to make a little bit of sense of it.
The first thing I saw was perhaps the most unbelievable of all. Right in front was the camp gate with the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ across the top in black-painted metal characters. I had seen this gate many times in photographs and films but, like Belsen, it had taken on a mythical character – a prop in a war film, like jackboots or swastikas. But here it was, in real life, the very gate that must have clanged shut behind the millions brought here to be exterminated. And it was much smaller than I had imagined. Presumably photographers and film-makers have taken their shots from near ground level and have used magnifying lenses to make the gate more imposing and frightening than it really is. The real gate does not somehow seem big enough to carry the weight of its own history.
Passing through the gate led on to the buildings making up the front of the camp. These are the administration buildings – the huts where the prisoners lived are situated to the rear of the camp. The Polish authorities have set up exhibitions in these buildings. There are corridors, on each side of which are large glass windows like shop windows. Behind the windows are piles of articles taken from the prisoners as they arrived in the camp – piles of spectacles, piles of cut hair, piles of shoes – men’s, women’s and children’s, even piles of wooden legs. The sheer size of these piles is, I suppose, intended to convey something of the scale of the atrocity. But somehow it has the opposite effect – to numb the senses. I gazed but felt immune to pity, or sorrow or anger. I had previously been inside the Pawiak prison in Warsaw where the Gestapo interrogated prisoners using torture. There it is possible to see small items belonging to individual prisoners – a scrap of paper with a note from a loved one, a faded photograph, a name hurriedly scratched on a wall. These were far more evocative of personal tragedy than these huge piles of loot.
I walked around the camp from building to building. There were the communal latrines and wash houses, the hospital where prisoners were not only treated for illness but used in macabre experiments, and workshops. There were very few other visitors and I felt quite lonely and upset. I walked in the courtyard where executions by firing squad were carried out. At the end of the yard, up against a high brick wall, there is a thick raft of wooden railway sleepers. The prisoners to be executed would stand in front of this raft, blindfolded, and would be shot. The bullets are still embedded in the wood. The cells overlooking the courtyard all had the lower part of their windows blocked so that the inmates could hear the executions taking place but could not see anything.
After about two hours of walking around and getting more and more depressed I came to the site of the crematoria where the real work of the camp went on. Again I tried to understand and comprehend what it must have been like here in the early 1940’s – just at the time when my mother was giving birth to me! Ordinary people, young and old, men and women, children, the sick, the lame, sharing the one distinguishing feature that to the Nazi they were vermin, were killed in their millions by poison gas and their bodies burned to ash. Right here! Right where I was standing!
The gassing halls and ovens were smashed by the retreating Nazis and by the liberating Russians. But the rubble itself is eloquent enough. And standing quietly above it all is a huge modern monument commemorating those who died, or rather, those who were murdered, here.
In my entire life I have never experienced such a feeling of depression as I felt at that moment. My mind tried to grapple with the questions that must beset everyone who visits this spot. How could the nation of Bach and Luther have stooped as low as this? Why was there no-one from that nation prepared to stand against it? And, of course - could it happen again? As I turned round and walked away, I realised I was crying. Tears were welling up in my eyes and I looked around hastily to see if anyone was watching. There was no-one there and it had got suddenly much colder and darker. I hurried back towards the main camp buildings.
As I made my way round the edges of the huts in which the prisoners had lived, I realised that I had not taken any photographs to remind me of the visit. I took out my camera and pointed it back to the crematoria and the modern monument. I took a couple of pictures by flash of the dreadful, dreary interiors of the huts with their dirty squashed-up bunks. I then realised that I did not have a picture showing the full extent of the camp.
The huts themselves were in neat rows and columns – perhaps 20 rows and twenty columns for 400 huts in all. Guessing that each hut could accommodate, with appalling overcrowding, 200 people, that would mean that at any one time the camp could hold 80,000 prisoners. I wanted to get a picture that would convey that enormity.
The huts occupied the central part of the camp. Around the whole camp was an electrified fence, its barbed wires hanging from decaying concrete stanchions via lines of grey ceramic insulators. Between the fence and the huts there was a wide expanse of scrubby grass. When the camp was operational this would have been a no-mans-land, kept grass-free and well raked to disclose any attempt to escape.
I realised that if I walked out onto this grassy surround I could get far enough away from the huts to take a wide enough picture. Looking round to see that there were no signs forbidding it, I walked out onto the grass. I must have walked about half way to the fence – a distance of maybe 100 metres – when I stopped, turned and began focussing my camera. My camera had no telephoto lens, so to get just the right picture I stepped backwards a couple of yards. Perfect. I took a couple of pictures of the distant huts. Then I turned to take a picture of the fence. And I froze!
Right in front of me, just behind me when I had been taking the pictures of the huts, was a large hole in the ground. It was perhaps 2 metres square. Had I taken just one or two more steps back I would undoubtedly have fallen into the hole!
I got down onto my hands and knees and gingerly crawled to the edge of the hole and peered in. It was too dark to see much, but it was clearly a bare concrete bunker or cellar. It was about 6 metres deep and I could just make out that it had sheer vertical concrete walls. The hole I was looking into was not near any of the four walls but appeared to be located in the very centre of the ceiling.
Had I fallen in, I would certainly, at least, have broken a leg. Even without such an injury I would have been completely unable to reach the hole. No-one knew I was there. No-one would have heard me shouting even if my injuries had allowed me to shout. I would have been trapped, injured and helpless in a dark damp cold cellar inside Auschwitz extermination camp. I have no doubt I would have died – in circumstances of such bleak horror that I began to shake as I contemplated it.
I must have lain there, going over and over the nightmare that might have been, for a good ten minutes. In that time I saw no-one and it slowly got darker and darker. Eventually I managed to push myself to my feet, and I ran, stumbling, but watchful for other holes, back to the path round the huts.
When I got back to the camp entrance, my taxi was waiting. I jumped in. The driver was expecting me to travel in the front beside him as I had on the way from Crakow to Auschwitz, but I got into the back. Although he tried to engage me in a halting conversation, I could not speak. He must have thought that I had been badly affected by the visit, and of course, he was right. But I didn’t tell him, or anyone else, till now, of my brush with unimaginable horror.
Around 1990 I was invited to Crakow in Poland for a scientific meeting. I flew in and took a taxi to the hotel, a modern building just outside the town centre on a bank of the Vistula with a lovely view across to the old town and the Wawel castle. The meeting itself was unremarkable.
After the meeting, on my last day in Crakow I had planned to visit Auschwitz. The site of the Nazi concentration camp is near the village of Oswiecim about 30 miles west of Crakow. I took a taxi. The driver was very keen to drive me back after my visit and offered to stay on, presumably without taking any other fares, until I came out. I agreed a price with him, went into the modern entrance hall, bought a ticket and started my tour with a feeling of fear, sadness and a strange, and unwelcome, pride, as though I was saying to myself “This is a terrible place, where inconceivable acts of cruelty took place, but we British would never have done it”.
For a long time I had been horribly fascinated by the concept of ‘extermination’ and its application to Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other ‘undesirables’. As a young child I had heard people talking about the Nazis, Hitler and ‘The Final Solution’. I had heard of Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen. But, and it was probably just as well, I could not grasp the reality. Rather, I got the impression that these deeds, people and places were, like blood-sucking vampires, like Sinbad’s incubus, like Red-Riding-Hood’s wolf, not real but mythical, metaphors for horror rather than horror itself. My mother, looking at a thin child (even her own – me!) would say “Needs a good feed – looks like someone out of Belsen”. So the name ‘Belsen’, rather than evoking the unimaginably terrible hell of starvation, torture and death that it was, became, to me simply the symbol of just…skinnyness.
But as I grew older and listened to the radio and watched Pathe News I began to pick up messages of cruelty and inhumanity on a scale that completely overwhelmed my ability to absorb. I watched in disbelief, that was always overtaken by numbed belief, the pictures of skeletal corpses being bulldozed into mass graves; the lines of mothers holding the hands, for the last time, of the children they would never see again; the piled up naked bodies of elderly men and women denied even the token dignity of a scrap of clothing at the cruel end of their shattered lives.
As my incredulity evaporated and I started to store the truth and its evidence into my hungry memory banks I realised for the first awful time, when I was about fourteen years old, that there was a rotten black dried-blood-encrusted cancer right at the centre of the human character. From that time on I hated any kind of discrimination whether it be against people of different races, faiths or whatever. From that time on I became a Socialist, a United Nations supporter, an anti-nationalist, a pan-European, an atheist, a humanist and a democrat. And from that time on I wanted to visit those places where the evil had happened so that I might, just might, be able to make a little bit of sense of it.
The first thing I saw was perhaps the most unbelievable of all. Right in front was the camp gate with the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ across the top in black-painted metal characters. I had seen this gate many times in photographs and films but, like Belsen, it had taken on a mythical character – a prop in a war film, like jackboots or swastikas. But here it was, in real life, the very gate that must have clanged shut behind the millions brought here to be exterminated. And it was much smaller than I had imagined. Presumably photographers and film-makers have taken their shots from near ground level and have used magnifying lenses to make the gate more imposing and frightening than it really is. The real gate does not somehow seem big enough to carry the weight of its own history.
Passing through the gate led on to the buildings making up the front of the camp. These are the administration buildings – the huts where the prisoners lived are situated to the rear of the camp. The Polish authorities have set up exhibitions in these buildings. There are corridors, on each side of which are large glass windows like shop windows. Behind the windows are piles of articles taken from the prisoners as they arrived in the camp – piles of spectacles, piles of cut hair, piles of shoes – men’s, women’s and children’s, even piles of wooden legs. The sheer size of these piles is, I suppose, intended to convey something of the scale of the atrocity. But somehow it has the opposite effect – to numb the senses. I gazed but felt immune to pity, or sorrow or anger. I had previously been inside the Pawiak prison in Warsaw where the Gestapo interrogated prisoners using torture. There it is possible to see small items belonging to individual prisoners – a scrap of paper with a note from a loved one, a faded photograph, a name hurriedly scratched on a wall. These were far more evocative of personal tragedy than these huge piles of loot.
I walked around the camp from building to building. There were the communal latrines and wash houses, the hospital where prisoners were not only treated for illness but used in macabre experiments, and workshops. There were very few other visitors and I felt quite lonely and upset. I walked in the courtyard where executions by firing squad were carried out. At the end of the yard, up against a high brick wall, there is a thick raft of wooden railway sleepers. The prisoners to be executed would stand in front of this raft, blindfolded, and would be shot. The bullets are still embedded in the wood. The cells overlooking the courtyard all had the lower part of their windows blocked so that the inmates could hear the executions taking place but could not see anything.
After about two hours of walking around and getting more and more depressed I came to the site of the crematoria where the real work of the camp went on. Again I tried to understand and comprehend what it must have been like here in the early 1940’s – just at the time when my mother was giving birth to me! Ordinary people, young and old, men and women, children, the sick, the lame, sharing the one distinguishing feature that to the Nazi they were vermin, were killed in their millions by poison gas and their bodies burned to ash. Right here! Right where I was standing!
The gassing halls and ovens were smashed by the retreating Nazis and by the liberating Russians. But the rubble itself is eloquent enough. And standing quietly above it all is a huge modern monument commemorating those who died, or rather, those who were murdered, here.
In my entire life I have never experienced such a feeling of depression as I felt at that moment. My mind tried to grapple with the questions that must beset everyone who visits this spot. How could the nation of Bach and Luther have stooped as low as this? Why was there no-one from that nation prepared to stand against it? And, of course - could it happen again? As I turned round and walked away, I realised I was crying. Tears were welling up in my eyes and I looked around hastily to see if anyone was watching. There was no-one there and it had got suddenly much colder and darker. I hurried back towards the main camp buildings.
As I made my way round the edges of the huts in which the prisoners had lived, I realised that I had not taken any photographs to remind me of the visit. I took out my camera and pointed it back to the crematoria and the modern monument. I took a couple of pictures by flash of the dreadful, dreary interiors of the huts with their dirty squashed-up bunks. I then realised that I did not have a picture showing the full extent of the camp.
The huts themselves were in neat rows and columns – perhaps 20 rows and twenty columns for 400 huts in all. Guessing that each hut could accommodate, with appalling overcrowding, 200 people, that would mean that at any one time the camp could hold 80,000 prisoners. I wanted to get a picture that would convey that enormity.
The huts occupied the central part of the camp. Around the whole camp was an electrified fence, its barbed wires hanging from decaying concrete stanchions via lines of grey ceramic insulators. Between the fence and the huts there was a wide expanse of scrubby grass. When the camp was operational this would have been a no-mans-land, kept grass-free and well raked to disclose any attempt to escape.
I realised that if I walked out onto this grassy surround I could get far enough away from the huts to take a wide enough picture. Looking round to see that there were no signs forbidding it, I walked out onto the grass. I must have walked about half way to the fence – a distance of maybe 100 metres – when I stopped, turned and began focussing my camera. My camera had no telephoto lens, so to get just the right picture I stepped backwards a couple of yards. Perfect. I took a couple of pictures of the distant huts. Then I turned to take a picture of the fence. And I froze!
Right in front of me, just behind me when I had been taking the pictures of the huts, was a large hole in the ground. It was perhaps 2 metres square. Had I taken just one or two more steps back I would undoubtedly have fallen into the hole!
I got down onto my hands and knees and gingerly crawled to the edge of the hole and peered in. It was too dark to see much, but it was clearly a bare concrete bunker or cellar. It was about 6 metres deep and I could just make out that it had sheer vertical concrete walls. The hole I was looking into was not near any of the four walls but appeared to be located in the very centre of the ceiling.
Had I fallen in, I would certainly, at least, have broken a leg. Even without such an injury I would have been completely unable to reach the hole. No-one knew I was there. No-one would have heard me shouting even if my injuries had allowed me to shout. I would have been trapped, injured and helpless in a dark damp cold cellar inside Auschwitz extermination camp. I have no doubt I would have died – in circumstances of such bleak horror that I began to shake as I contemplated it.
I must have lain there, going over and over the nightmare that might have been, for a good ten minutes. In that time I saw no-one and it slowly got darker and darker. Eventually I managed to push myself to my feet, and I ran, stumbling, but watchful for other holes, back to the path round the huts.
When I got back to the camp entrance, my taxi was waiting. I jumped in. The driver was expecting me to travel in the front beside him as I had on the way from Crakow to Auschwitz, but I got into the back. Although he tried to engage me in a halting conversation, I could not speak. He must have thought that I had been badly affected by the visit, and of course, he was right. But I didn’t tell him, or anyone else, till now, of my brush with unimaginable horror.
